The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy ruptu...re, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank,--for the sun acts on one side first,--and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me,--had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (leibo, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; lobos, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words); externally, a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single-lobed, or B, double-lobed), with the liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the gutteral g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feather and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

You go back and tell them that the New York State Supreme Court rules there's no Santa Claus. It's all over the papers. The kids r...ead it and they don't hang up their stockings. Now what happens to all the toys that are supposed to be in those stockings? Nobody buys them. The toy manufacturers are going to like that. So they have to lay off a lot of their employees. Union employees. Now you've got the C.I.O. and the A.F. of L. against you, and they're going to adore you for it. And they're gonna say it with votes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The master plan was laid out months ago. Jack Kemp would give 200 rubber-chicken dinners (sometimes it's meatballs or just cocktai...ls) between Jan. 1, 1995, and Jan. l, 1996. What the plan did not say was that he would be expected to deliver the same lines, ingratiate himself to political hangers-on and, most humiliating of all, beg them for money.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A law explains a set of observations; a theory explains a set of laws. The quintessential illustration of this jump in level is th...e way in which Newton's theory of mechanics explained Kepler's law of planetary motion. Basically, a law applies to observed phenomena in one domain (e.g., planetary bodies and their movements), while a theory is intended to unify phenomena in many domains. Thus, Newton's theory of mechanics explained not only Kepler's laws, but also Galileo's findings about the motion of balls rolling down an inclined plane, as well as the pattern of oceanic tides. Unlike laws, theories often postulate unobservable objects as part of their explanatory mechanism. So, for instance, Freud's theory of mind relies upon the unobservable ego, superego, and id, and in modern physics we have theories of elementary particles that postulate various types of quarks, all of which have yet to be observed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

[James G. Blaine's] devotion to the public interests, his marked ability, and his exalted patriotism have won for him the gratitud...e and affection of his countrymen and the admiration of the world. In the varied pursuits of legislation, diplomacy, and literature his genius has added new luster to American citizenship.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Lisa Fremont: Surprise is the most important element of attack. And besides, you're not up on your private eye literature. When th...ey're in trouble it's always their girl Friday who gets them out of it.L.B. Jeffries: Well, is she the girl who saves him from the clutches of the seductive show girls and the over passionate daughters of the rich?Lisa Fremont: The same.L.B. Jeffries: That's the one, huh? But he never ends up marrying her, does he? That's strange.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

[F]rankly ... it was perfectly true that I had, for over a year, expressed the opinion that Indo-China should not go back to Franc...e but that it should be administered by an international trusteeship. France has had the country ... for nearly one hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning.... France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indo-China are entitled to something better than that.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »